Thursday, December 11, 2014

This fall I was approached by the Outdoor Project and TRAK Kayaks to do 25 trip reports throughout the Puget Sound area in a 2 month period. Up until this point I had only been on a handful of kayaking trips, one in the San Juans, where I promptly stabbed myself in the hand trying to remove a pit from an avocado and one around Vashon Island. With years of whitewater kayaking under my belt, the prospect of doing all of these presented the familiar challenges of dealing with the unpredictability of the water, weather, and logistics, but also unfamiliar challenges. Being from the middle of the country, I'd have to learn how to deal with the tricky tides and currents of the Puget Sound, as well as the navigational, technical, and psychological challenges of paddling through fog, through busy shipping lanes, and rough stretches of open water in all sorts of weather conditions. With the weather turning worse and worse every week I decided to spend 7 days kayaking over 80 miles in the San Juan Islands by myself in mid October and knock out the rest of the trips in either single day adventures or overnight trips exploring the South Sound and Seattle/Tacoma areas. The challenge for many of these trips was that would be traveling by myself so I had to get creative with a little bit of self portraiture.